Significance of "childish errors" in mainstream language change

Question

Over on ELU the question Is “bettern't” an OK word to use? drew me into debate about how significant "childish errors" are in the development of mainstream language. Hence, the question:

Are "childish errors" significant forces of language change?

I'll put my cards on the table and say straight off that my inclination is to think the answer is "not very". Two reasons immediately come to mind...

• As an avid fan of Steven Pinker, I'm a great believer in the idea that children are to a considerable extent "pre-programmed" to emulate what they hear, rather than coin neologisms. And by implication, they're strongly motivated to quickly discard "apparently logical" forms when adults correct them ("Mummy! I be'ed wee-wee on the floor!" must have been said many times, but soon dropped).

• The ability to produce "correct" speech strongly correlates with social status, so parents have considerable motivation to ensure their children do this as early and well as possible.

When I think about things like the etymology of "orange", I don't really see this as relating to faulty language acquisition by children, but I freely admit I'm an armchair philologist in such matters.

Answer 1

In Understanding Language Change (McMahon, 1994) there's a great statement:

"Historical linguists have so far had little success in assuming that children learning language initiate language change, since there is very limited overlap between changes and characteristics of child language.... How the child learns therefore seems more relevant to the historical linguist than the performance errors she makes."

Here are a couple papers that may help illustrate the point.

Kerswil, in "Children, Adolescents, and Language Change", directly and extensively tackles your question of whether linguistic innovation comes from the speech of children. (He does restrict his study to language change resulting from language contact.) His findings are basically that different age groups are responsible for different types of language change in accordance with the usual order of language acquisition, which he gives as:

1. New phonological rules by age 3
2. New phonological oppositions by age 3-13
3. New grammatical parameters by age 8
4. Changes to prosody by age 12
5. New morphological classes in adolescence
6. Morphologically conditioned changes after age 4-7
7. All other linguistic changes at any age

I think this is important since it doesn't restrict itself to morphology and syntax errors, but to phonology, prosody, etc. as well. It also takes into account that adults can learn changes to vocabulary fairly easily; but changes in phonology are almost impossible to acquire past early childhood.

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Verhoef & de Boer in "Language acquisition age effects and their role in the preservation and change of communication systems" found that, if anything, language learning by children tends to help resist language change:

Recent advances in sociolinguistics indicate that changes in language learning ability while growing up can account for the different ways that linguistic changes spread from community to community. They found that the structure of the system is better preserved when speakers of all ages are involved in language contact as opposed to only adult to adult contact.

This last is an important point, in my opinion: nearly all authorities agree that language change is driven by social groups, not individuals; so the ability of children to influence change depends on sociolinguistic factors. E.g. modern Western high school students may be an important group due to their wide social influence, but babies are seldom likely to drive change since they have little to no social influence.

I think looking at all these the overall effect is that performance errors by children don't have very great effects - but that the process of language acquisition by children influences the type and scope of change.

Answer 2

What those "childish errors" really show are that children are generating language, not just repeating it. Think "This is a wug. There are two __." (Sorry, kids, the answer is "wuggen." There's more than one way to pluralize a wug.)

I would definitely argue that, particularly in verbs, the generative rules that children learn and then unlearn for irregular verbs is a factor in language change. It might not come directly from children, but the regularization of verbs happens:

Lieberman charted the progress of 177 irregular verbs from the 9th century Old English of Beowulf, to the 13th century Middle English of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, to the modern 21st century English of Harry Potter. Today, only 98 of these are still irregular...

Intuitively,

They regularise in a way that is 'inversely proportional to the square root of their frequency'.

That is, the more infrequently they are used, the less likely it is that somebody's going to remember the irregular form so they just follow the rules they know.

These are "early modern English" verbal forms (about 400 years ago):

• help, holp, have holpen
• swell, swole, have swollen
• melt, molt, have molten
• slide, slid, have slidden
• abide, abode, have abidden
• strike, struck, have stricken
• shear, shore; have shorn

Some of these forms survive as adjectives ("shorn," "stricken", "swollen"), but "have holpen"? Yeah, right.

Interestingly, there are a few of verbs particularly in American English that have gone the other direction: where past participle form ("have __ed") was regular, but because there was a very common, phonologically similar word, it was "irregularized."

• dive, dove, have dived; "dove" like "drove"
• sneak, snuck, have sneaked; "snuck" like ...idk.

This is not very common, probably hypergrammaticalization, a very "grown up" occurrence. I mean, adults get things "wrong" all the time. (My peeve is phenomenon/phenomena.) English in particular is a confusing mess of different verbal paradigms and borrowed words with borrowed plurals from a half-dozen other languages. (Phenomenon/phenomena is Greek, but radius/radii is Latin, etc.) Point is: you still know exactly what the kid means when she says "gooses" or "thesises" or, as my niece is attributed, referring to a babydoll whose eyes would open and close: "She oped her eyes!"

The key concepts for verb regularization are economy and analogy. Why remember forms when instead you could remember one simple rule? Think about programming a vocabulary into a computer: would you rather program every form of every word, or just tell it to concatenate the verb with "ed" to form the past tense and concatenate the noun with "s" to form the plural? Child (and adult) speakers' brains are just as lazy as the programmer-you is in this scenario. We'd all rather things be simple, neh?

Answer 3

With due regard to @mollyocr's answer, I shall answer my own question.

The errors children make include a high proportion of utterances where they've correctly identified a "general principle", but haven't yet learnt that it doesn't apply in some particular case. Common errors obviously being to apply the rules for regular verbs/plurals to irregular words.

Collectively we have a vested interest in discarding existing irregular forms (also in preventing new ones appearing, but that's so easy we barely notice we're doing it). Of the existing irregular forms, only a few intractable ones still survive (intractable because they're so common it's difficult to change them).

Every time a child makes a mistake in the "right" direction in respect of irregular/illogical forms, they raise awareness of how we'd like things to be. Like biological evolution, language change can take a very long time - but language, unlike biology, is guided by our own rational thoughts. Be it ever so slowly, adults gradually come to adopt the "logical" errors made by people (including children), while correcting the "illogical" ones.

I don't think childish errors directly influence language change, but some (the ones we judge logical) constantly remind us of certain illogicalities. Plus they provide a mechanism for adults to increasingly adopt those "errors" in appropriate circumstances, which may eventually become all circumstances.